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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9780143039716
ISBN number: 0143039717
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: July 25, 2006
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 196408
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London’s The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. What begins as a war of words ends in scenes of harrowing violence as the state oligarchy, known as “the Iron Heel,” moves to crush all opposition to its power. BACKCOVER: “A truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come.”
—George Orwell
“Still more astonishing is the genuinely prophetic vision of the methods by which the Iron Heel will sustain its domination over crushed mankind.”
—Leon Trotsky
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Rated by buyers 
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One part socialist dogma, one part muckraking expose and one part thrilling drama, The Iron Heel was and is dynamite. Much is made of London's predictions about fascism, and the book does seem to predict the actions of the Nazi's in the Reichstag fire affair, but in truth, the notion of fascism as the successor to liberal capitalism is a standard Marxist historical analysis. Nevertheless, the book is brilliant, and very well written. It is easy reading and a book you won't want to put down. I read it in a day. It is as relevant now as ever, in spite of its age, and the only fault you might ascribe is London's failure to predict the rise and power of the mass media. Sure, the Iron Heel of our day are not built on rails, but on oil, but this is only a minor error of timing. The capitalists have in fact frozen the market in an endeavor to retain their market dominance, they have simply done it a little later than London imagined, and frankly, the truth is that London was not seeking to write a history of the future, it is not a specific prediction, but a general one, and as that, it is chilling. Vive la revolution.
Rated by buyers 
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If you are looking for a dystopian novel similar to Nineteen Eighty Four or a Brave New World you may be disappointed. Unlike Orwell or Huxley, London's dystopia is mundane and lacks any fantasic qualities.There is no cult of personality which the population is required to worship.Nor is society based of eugenics and drug abuse.Rather the nightmare scenario London presents in this novel is an America ruled lock, stock and barrel by a corporate oligarchy.London never deeply describes the Iron Heel's ideology or pathology.It may seem obvious what a coporate oligarchy would want yet these missing details take away from the depth of the novel.London fails to grant the oligracy a personality beyond the superficial.We know that the Iron Heel formed in order to prevent a socialist revoultion in America yet we are granted no greater insight into the psychology of the group beyond this small detail.We see the Iron Heel oppress but we do not know what drives them to oppress.
Aside from the lack of details about the Iron Heel and shallow socialist argument in the early chapters the novel is masterfully written.The details into the psychology of the revolutionaries and their individual personalities are rich and intriguing.The transformation of Avis Everhard from a petty rich intellectual into a violent revolutionary is gripping and feels authentic.The chapters on revolutionaries actions against the Iron Heel are is so full of subterfuge and paranoia the book begins to read like a spy novel.
In conclusion there are minor details which prevent me from giving this book a five star rating.Yet it is such an interesting and provoking work that I recommend it to anybody who wonders what an authoritarian America would look like or what it is like to fight in a resistance movement.
Rated by buyers 
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To mark the 100th anniversary of the 1908 publication of Jack London's "The Iron Heel", "The Socialist Standard" published an article attacking the book as "a decidedly anti-socialist work... considered a classic of its time... for all the wrong reasons". This naturally piqued my interest, and put the novel on my radar to pick up from the library.
"The Iron Heel" is presented as an historical manuscript discovered some seven centuries in the future, a draft of memoirs written in the early 1930s by Avis Everhard, a socialist revolutionary. Avis, assisted by footnotes from a future historian, relates the process through which very first America and then the world is taken over by a brutal plutocratic dictatorship -- dubbed the "Iron Heel" -- in the years after 1912. The victory of the Iron Heel comes about despite the best efforts of Avis and her husband, Ernest Everhard, a brilliant socialist philosopher-warrior-prophet-king, "a super-man, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described" (12), and, of course, the fictionalized persona of London himself. Right from the start, we are informed that the Iron Heel is to triumph and reign for centuries, all opposition forced underground into endless guerrilla warfare, which London modeled on the violent conflict between certain Russian revolutionists and the Tsar's Empire.
The greatest strength of London's novel, emphasized by Jonathan Auerbach's introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition, is the way both the Iron Heel and the armed resistance opposing it mirror each other in their tactics, strategy, and even ideology. Both infiltrate each other's organizations, and then infiltrate each other's infiltrations; both judge and execute; both must kill or be killed; both know their cause is just and righteous, the source and protection of all that is good in the world; both view the masses/working class/common people as a primitive, backwards and barbaric force to be feared and manipulated against their enemies. The only character who does no harm is merely caught in the crossfire, anonymously gunned down in the streets of Chicago.
Unfortunately, such positive aspects of the novel are largely overwhelmed by other features both irritating and troubling. On the purely irritating end, the future historian's footnotes are sometimes used to good effect, but often simply tack on quotes or citations that are too pedantic or artificial to fit in text itself. Forking these off into footnotes doesn't help. And speaking of artificiality, the political debates in the earlier chapters often read less like dialogue than like a simplistic Marxist catechism -- occasional question, long uninterrupted response.
Much more disturbing is London's half romantic, half apocalyptic vision of ceaseless warfare between bands of Nietzschean supermen and the shadowy, oppressive state. Coupled with his (perhaps unconscious) racism and (very conscious) "social Darwinism", this helps account for the book's otherwise puzzling appeal to far-right "survivalists" and white nationalists. Indeed, although London's future historian comes from a peaceful, democratic socialist society, much of "The Iron Heel" is a thinly-veiled social-Darwinist attack on the Socialists of London's day. In the novel, the Socialists disregard Everhard's (London's) warnings about the coming struggle for survival. They are weak and pacifistic, relying on democracy, education, and mass organization to build the co-operative commonwealth, and so they fail. They are completely smashed by the Iron Heel, which persists for centuries before naturally falling apart under its own weight.
The style of "The Iron Heel" as a whole struck me as much more like that of Ayn Rand than that of Karl Marx or any other socialist. The chief difference from Rand's works is that instead of caring only for themselves, London's super-men care (for reasons that are far from convincing) only for a working class that is almost completely invisible. Common people are helpless to liberate themselves, and all the Iron Heel has to do to retain power is buy off (or kill off) whatever super-men rear their heads amongst the "people of the abyss". No wonder the "International Socialist Review" of the time panned the book as "well calculated to repel many whose addition to our forces is sorely needed".
Mussolini was far from the only ex-socialist whose views of struggle, strength, and survival led him to abandon democracy and buy into an Iron Heel of his own. Although Jack London died in 1916 at the age of 40, many see in his work strong suggestions that he was on a similar trajectory. In 1945, George Orwell mused that had London lived longer, "it is hard to be sure where his political allegiance would have lain... One can imagine him in the Communist Party, one can imagine him falling victim to the Nazi racial theory, and one can imagine him the quixotic champion of some Trotskyist or Anarchist sect." ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Jack London has seen the future and reports it here. This book has action, romance, violence and history before it happens. I have read this book over and over, still it remains current and prophetic. A freshman US Lit. class was my very first exposure, then two years later in a US History class The Iron Heel was on the extra credit reading list. Buy more than one copy because, in my experience, people you lend this to tend to forget to return it (or re-loan it).
An other historical gem by Jack London is John Barleycorn.John Barleycorn
Rated by buyers -
MOst of the book (lets say the very first 225 pages) is essentially one character preaching a bunch of marxist theory. Ive neglected reading that socialist stuff, so it was kinda interesting... but mostly tedius.
the last 25 pages are action packed and awesome. looks like a major influence on that children of men movie. so the book doesnt disappoint.
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